Surprise! The New Raspberry Pi Zero W Launches Today

Today is Raspberry Pi's fifth birthday, and instead of buying themselves a big cake, the Raspberry Pi Foundation's decided to give us a present instead: the Raspberry Pi Zero W.

In short, it's the Pi Zero with the wireless features of the Pi 3B mixed in, namely 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.0. Oh, and did we mention it costs a tenner? Yep, just $10 plus tax, or £9.60 on these shores.

And the best bit of all? It's available from today. The Raspberry Pi company tells us they'll have about 80,000 units available straight off, although at first it'll understandably be one per customer. They'll be available from UK stockists Pimoroni, The Pi Hut and ModMyPi; and in North America from Adafruit, Micro Center and Canakit.

CEO Eben Upton CBE tells Gizmodo, "Since we launched Zero in November 2015, we've seen hundreds of neat IoT applications, many of which involved plugging a WiFi dongle into the device's USB port to get connectivity. Adding wireless networking to the board itself felt like the obvious next step, and we're very excited to see what people get up to with it."

They've also announced a very cool injection-moulded case with swappable lids.

It'll cost around a fiver, depending on the reseller.

We reckon the Raspberry Pi Zero W is going to be insanely popular - the possible uses for this tiny piece of tech brilliance are innumerable. Inevitably, that means hackers will have their eye on it too - the Zero has already been used for some nefarious purposes, and the Zero W will make that even easier. Well, we'd better buy them all before the hackers get their hands on any, then.